BCAA Travel Blog

We were rolling down the highway under a starry sky somewhere near Puerto Escondido. Crazy Julio was at the wheel. Heading into town we stopped to pick up two young hitchhikers—a pair of mariachi musicians. It turned out they were twins. The merry pair were decked out in gold lamé suits with big, white embroidered sombreros. They had guitars with them and as we sped through the humid Mexican darkness with the wind blowing in our hair, they began to play “Guantanamera.” The two brothers had beautiful voices and what had seemed like the start of a comical interlude suddenly changed into something very different. It was like watching two night flowers coming into bloom.

I can’t remember anything else about that day—only those few magical minutes in the van. But it is precisely these sorts of totally unpredictable and spontaneous incidents that make travel so rewarding. The thought of such moments stay with you long after the experience of the historic landmarks, the art museums and the swank hotels fade from memory.

Why do we travel? What do we hope to find out on the open road? Take a look at this collection of my favourite quotes on the subject and see which ones ring true for you.

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” — Aldous Huxley”

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –- Miriam Beard

“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” — Lawrence Block

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” — G.K. Chesterton

“I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” — Bill Bryson

“One of the gladdest moments in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.” — Sir Richard Francs Burton

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” — Pat Conroy

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” -– Paul Theroux

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” — Mark Twain

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” — St. Augustine

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things–air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky–all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” — Cesare Pavese

“Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”– Kurt Vonnegut

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”– Robert Louis Stevenson

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do–especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” — William Least Heat Moon

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” –- John Steinbeck

“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” -– Benjamin Disraeli

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” –- Pico Iyer

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